


Of Shadows and Memory

by Tassos



Series: A City Elf Walks Into a Blight - Ian Tabris Stories [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: City Elf Origin, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5629642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tassos/pseuds/Tassos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was his mother's son, and life in the Alienage didn't sit well with him.</p><p>Snapshots of a Tabris Warden growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Shadows and Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Who knew that my rogue city elf would be the first one to get fic feels? Self-contained for now, but this is potentially the start of something longer. Ratings and pairings will change accordingly.

This is what he remembers of his mother: She was angry. Not at him, not beyond what a mother feels for a small child intent on childish wants, but angry at the world. Sometimes at his father, sometimes at Valendrian, and always alway at the guards and noblemen who came into the Alienage as if it belonged to them. They'd rap on doors to toss homes for contraband, demand favors, harass their servants who were supposed to be home for the day.

Sometimes his father reminded her that it did belong to them, that they lived on the Arl's sufferance no matter how much she might hate it. Then his mother would remind him: "No, we don't," and stalk off with her two short daggers down a back alley to dance.

Ian loved watching his mother dance. He would sneak up to watch her from behind some barrels or from under nearby stairs, and sometimes when she caught him -- because she always caught him -- her face would break into a rare smile and she'd beckon him over.

"These are not just weapons," she'd say, handing him a pair of sticks the same length as her daggers. "These are extensions of your arms." She'd reach around him and move them through the forms. "Part of your body." She'd nudge his feet till his body was balanced. "You keep them healthy and whole, just like the rest of you, and they may save your life one day."

Ian didn't know then how true that would be.

It was true for his mother, until one day it wasn't.

He was twelve when she went out into the city proper for work one day. One of the messages she was to deliver led her down an alley near one of the estates where she was cut down by a noble's guard for being a thief, they said. His father wouldn't let him see her body, and that's when Ian felt the first stirrings of a fearsome, helpless rage.

* * *

Soris never wanted to rock the boat, so Ian snuck off with Shianni to practice what he could remember of the forms his mother taught him. He'd go through them slowly, then faster, and sometimes they'd go up against each other. Shianni wasn't comfortable with the last practice sticks his mother had made him.

"I'm going to learn to shoot a bow and arrow. Just as deadly but safely far away," she said, one summer morning when they were fifteen. They were laying under one of the second story walkways, out of the sun. Shianni had swiped a bottle of wine from a crate tucked into the back of Alarath's mother's shop, and they were passing it back and forth between them,

"And who's going to teach you?" Ian scoffed. "You have to sell your soul over to some noble's guard if you want to learn that."

"Polara knows how. She said she'd teach me," Shianni punched him in the arm. "You're one to talk. You know two dueling forms with wooden sticks. You've never even held a real blade."

"Yes, I have."

"Holding Aunt Adaia's daggers as a kid doesn't count."

Ian wanted to retort but couldn't speak past the sudden lump in his throat. His father had put her daggers away somewhere Ian never found them, though he'd looked and looked. Their house wasn't that big, and Ian could pick every lock in them, but still nothing. He dared not ask because he was afraid that his father had sold them, and he couldn't bear knowing that.

"Sorry," Shianni said after a moment, passing him the wine bottle.

"It's okay," Ian said. "One day I'll find them. And until then I'll keep practicing."

* * *

"Honest work! That's all I ask of you!" His father yelled.

"It was honest! I was paid a fair wage!" he shouted back.

"By a criminal! Those men are thugs. And don't bother trying to lie to me about what they asked you to do! Crispeth saw you slip into her master's home!" 

"It's not like that -"

But his father threw up his hands and turned away, his braids flying in his face in his anger. "We raised you better than that."

Ian huffed in frustration because his father wouldn't even listen to him. "It's not like that!" He said again, willing his father to believe him. "All they wanted was know the layout of the house -- I didn't steal anything."

"It's a fine line between stealing and enabling others to do the taking."

"If it wasn't me they'd find someone else, and it's good money. More than what you earn in a week," Ian said.

"And what if you were caught?" His father spun around again, and Ian had never seen him so worked up. "They would have you killed, or just execute you on the spot, and then what good would that money do you? And what of me? What would _I_ do without you?"

The words came in a rush and are such a shock to Ian that the angry retort on the tip of his tongue flew out of his head.

"I lost your mother. I won't lose you. Not to some foolishness." His father's eyes bore into his, and Ian could see the tears in the corners of them, angry, frustrated, afraid. He felt the prickle of tears in the corners of his own.

"You won't lose me. I'm careful," he said.

Ian hated the sorrow on his father's face. He looked tired, and when did he get so old. "You are too much your mother's son. Adaia was a fighter, and it didn't matter in the end. You need to find a good trade, not become some riffraff." His father nodded as if it was decided, and Ian didn't have the heart anymore to fight him on it.

* * *

Good trades were hard to come by in the Alienage. If it wasn't servitude, there wasn't much left to do that garnered enough to live on. For a while, Ian tried his hands at herbs and potions, he learned a thing or two a little more dangerous. He did odd jobs, and helped Valendrian organize the monthly meeting. He stayed in the Alienage where his father could keep an eye on him and was utterly bored.

"Why don't you ask if you can run messages -- just in the Market," Soris suggested. "You'd be able to get out a bit." It was winter, and they were holed up out of the wind at Soris and Shianni's house.

Ian was tired and cold, and he edged closer to the fire. "Running messages might be fine for a week, but then what?" he asked. The problem was, he didn't know what he wanted to do. He was eighteen. Sullen and angry with everything and everyone. "Father's afraid if I leave the Alienage, I'm going to want to leave Denerim next."

"Do you want to?" Soris asked with sincere curiosity.

"What, leave?" Ian hadn't really thought about it, and when he turned it over in his head now, he didn't know what to think about it. He had no real concept of what the world outside the city was like.

"You could ask your father to arrange your marriage so you go to another Alienage."

"We are _not_ talking about marriage!" Ian shuddered at the mere mention of it.

"Why not? It's going to happen. Soon, too. And unless you have your eye on someone here, it's going to be arranged for you." Soris blinked at him. "It's not someone here, is it? Is it? You have to tell me! Is it Delandria?"

"Delandria? No! You're the one sweet on Delandria. Who doesn't even like you."

"Then who?"

"No one! Why does there have to be someone? There isn't. I just don't want to get married. That's all."

"Uh huh." Soris clearly didn't believe him, but then Soris was a bit of dunderhead sometimes.

Ian huffed in frustration. "Why can't I not want to get married?" The thought of some strange woman, being his wife. Having children together. He didn't even like thinking about it. Ian wasn't like Soris, or most of the other boys for that matter, who sometimes speculated about what it would be like to be with a woman. He'd rather just hang out with the boys or Shianni forever. He didn't need the rest of it. The boys were prettier anyway.

But Soris wouldn't let it go. "You want to stay a child forever?"

"No." Ian glared at the fire, wishing there were another way to grow up without getting married.

* * *

It's a funny thing about wanting things, Ian reflected later. He wanted to hold a pair of proper blades in his hands. He wanted to use the cat-burglary skills he was good at, even if there was nothing in particular he wanted to steal. He wanted to get out of his marriage arrangement for as long as he'd known what it meant.

He didn't realize that all three would happen at the same time. Or that it would be nothing like he thought it would.

But that's the funny thing about anger, he reflected too. It's like a fire, banked and safe in the hearth until unleashed it becomes uncontrollable.

Nothing about the nobles storming into the Alienage surprised him except his own anger that had spent all morning curdling in the face of his upcoming nuptials. He'd wanted nothing more than steel in his hand then to show them what their real place in the Alienage was. And when they came back, took the women, well, Ian didn't remember much after his anger solidified into determination.

He didn't remember much of the fight through the Arl's estate. He remembered blood and his body moving through the forms that his mother had taught him. He remembered faltering when the sword caught on flesh and bone and didn't slice easily through the air. He'd never realized that the follow through motions were designed to help dislodge a dead body from his weapon.

He remembered Shianni crying and disheveled on the floor, and the rage that exploded from his chest when he saw her. He didn't remember killing Vaughn, and he didn't regret it either. He thought he probably should. Good people regretted killing, didn't they?

* * *

They'd been on the road south for two days before it hit Ian that he'd really left Denerim, and it was for good. He was sitting in the woods by the road with Duncan and another Denerim recruit who was fast asleep in his bedroll already. The trees and darkness made the world seem big in a way that it never had before. The sounds of the forest were nothing like what he was used to.

"Will I see my father again?" he asked quietly.

"If you survive the battle at Ostagar, you'll probably be able to go back to Denerim one day," Duncan said without looking up from the notebook he was writing in. He said it so matter-of-factly, that it took a moment for Ian to register that he was going into a war. Against creatures he'd only ever heard about in stories.

"I'm no soldier," he said. "I don't know why you picked me. I mean, I'm grateful I'm not in the dungeon, but I don't think I'll last much longer on the battlefield."

"You might surprise yourself," Duncan said, which sounded like an empty platitude. Ian still didn't know what to make of the Warden. He was human, and as armed and commanding as any of the humans that liked to wander into the Alienage to stir up trouble. But he was unlike every one of them. Ian had tried to return his borrowed sword -- elves weren't allowed weapons -- but Duncan had given him a half-smile and said "Keep it. You might need it," as if it were a sure thing.

It sat heavy across his back as they walked south, the strap chaffing against the unfamiliar leather jerkin he was wearing now too. His toes pinched in his mother's old boots. Everything was unfamiliar and strange and he wasn't sure it would ever feel right again in the world.

"Why did you offer to recruit me? Why not Soris, too? He went after them with me."

Duncan looked up from his writing this time, firelight flickering over his features and giving them a ghostly cast. "He was only willing after you said you were going. And you were ready to storm Urien's estate without even a weapon."

"I was angry."

"Anger is a weapon, too." Duncan nodded. "But the fact that you were willing to go up against trained soldiers for the sake of your bride I thought was admirable."

"For my cousin," Ian muttered. "And when you say it like that, it sounds like suicide."

Duncan chuckled. "It's a good attitude for a Grey Warden to have."

Ian didn't want to know what _that_ meant, and he didn't want to find out.

He didn't sleep well that night.

* * *

This was what Ian remembered about Ostagar. The first wolf he killed, hacking with his borrowed sword. The first darkspawn he cut down while telling himself that running away was not an option. The elation he'd felt when it was dead at his feet and he was still alive. Alistair handing him a dagger he'd looted from a dead body, with a casual, "Well, he's not going to need it anymore."

He remembered feeling short, and stupid, having to ask half a dozen questions to follow a conversation. The low level anger that came back when Jory said he couldn't be expected to know everything after all, because he was an elf.

But he mostly remembered fear. Fear when Daveth fell and Jory refused to drink. Fear when pain engulfed him. Fear when he opened his eyes, because this was it.

Ian had crawled to his knees afterward, and hadn't even minded when Alistair pulled him to his feet. He didn't feel different, but there was something in Alistair's eyes, solemn and resigned when he regarded Ian. Something in the way Duncan clasped his hand, and said, "Welcome to the Grey Wardens," that sealed his fate.

Blood rushed through Ian's ears and his heart pounded. _Changed._ He could never go home again. Never live the safe life his father wanted with a good trade, a good wife, children. The sword and dagger strapped to his back weren't so unfamiliar anymore. If he wanted to live, more dead would fall. It was a terrible burden, but at the same time, another feeling snuck in behind the fear. A little note, that made him think of his mother, storming off to train when she couldn't change the world she lived in.

Ian doubted he'd be able to change the world either. Who was he after all, except an elf from the city who knew two lousy dueling moves and how to pick someone's pocket.

But he knew his mother would have jumped at the chance he was given. And he knew that he was too much his mother's son not to embrace it.

* * *


End file.
